On Friday night, our family went by to visit an old high school friend of my wife’s who is in the late stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). For those unfamiliar with this horror, it’s basically the atrophying of all of your muscles while your brain remains intact and normal - eventually you die when your lungs stop working and you suffocate. Anyway, this guy is 34 years old, has a 3 year old son and he’s not likely to see Valentine’s Day 2004.
On Saturday I went for a run - one of the few since September as my wife is pregnant with #3, has terrible morning sickness and #2 is only 8 months old. There is a nice greenbelt near our house and it was a perfect, cool overcast day. In the middle of the holiday craziness, bummed that my bike has been hanging in the garage since the LA Tri, wondering when I’ll get to race again, I got to thinking of that guy just sitting there wide awake and fully aware while his body is dying around him.
All of a sudden I wasn’t running for a target HR or a PR or for base miles, speedwork, junk miles or anything scheduled, timed, measured or logged. Just feeling it.
I don’t suppose anyone really knows how they would react to a devestating injury, a debilitating illness or other such event. I can’t pretend that I could ever understand what that guy is going through, but I felt that I at least honored him a little by just spending a few moments being truly grateful for such a simple thing as running.